Real Winter weather

I know I said I would do a review of the year, but it has been too cold to spend time in front of the computer this week, and as the old Typepad blog has gone, I will have to review photos from the months of January to July at least to work out what to say about those months.  That will have to wait for next weekend, when we should have had a couple of warmer days.

Indeed adding photos currently is problematic - either due to a cold computer or to frosted lines!  I'll try again!

That's better.  Even so, strange things keep happening - perhaps someone in China is trying to hack Blogger and all that use it?  Who knows?

I think I have explained before that we have a good electricity contract, that for 300 days of the year means that we get very cheap electricity.  For another 43 days, there is a slight reduction in the price per unit.  Then for 22 days a year, the electricity unit price is exorbitant, really ouch-worthy.  So last Monday was a Red day (the high price day), Tuesday was White (a middle price day) and Wednesday, New Year's Eve, was another Red day.  As the day is 6am to 6am, that would have put paid to any celebrations here that required electric heating, kettles, irons, raclette ovens and the like.  In practice, it sent us to bed very early with hot water bottles, hot milk and good books!

The rest of the week has been White, although today is Blue (Sundays have to be Blue or low price - it's in the contract), and tomorrow we are back to Red.  It limits what you can do, and thankfully I am no longer required to be in front of a computer all day every day.

Naturally there are upsides to this cold.  It is excellent for the trees and particularly the fruit trees, which need this cold shock to properly calm down after an extraordinary fruit season last year and to kill off any bugs and nasties that are doing the rounds.  It also means that there are lots of lovely photos to be taken of ice crystals on various things.

Naturally some wildlife will struggle.  We feed birds over at the Place in the Country and the tits are getting through lots of fat balls and seed bells.  My camera bird feeder is now in place and will be (I hope) stuffed full of photos and videos of birds fighting over the seed largesse that I've put out.  I've had to refill it once and it will need done again tomorrow.  I'm also capturing on average 16 different species of bird each visit on the Merlin bird song app.

Getting firewood in from the One Acre Wood keeps us warm during the day, and the joys of visiting the Wood are many, but perhaps the greatest is taking time to enjoy the amazing view north across the valley.

In theory, this cold snap should break around Wednesday or Thursday.  It is fairly remarkable.  We don't remember such cold temperatures over such a long period since January/February 2012, when we had some 8 inches of snow and temperatures down to about -10 degrees Celsius overnight for about ten days.  The last proper snow was February 2018, when we had our new stairs fitted, and then only 3 or 4 inches lasting 3 or 4 days.  Last winter was cool - for days and days the temperatures wavered between -1 and +3 and overcast, which was challenging for the soul.  This sharp cold is challenging for the extremities!

So, Happy New Year to you!  Tomorrow is our second go at having fibre optic (or superfast broadband) installed, so next week there may, or may not, be a blog reviewing 2025, depending on how that installation goes.  Fingers crossed!

Have a good week!